Various systems, such as various types of vehicles and the systems and subsystems that comprise the vehicles, may be subject to potentially severe environmental conditions, shock, vibration, and normal component wear. These conditions, as well as others, may have deleterious effects on vehicle operability. These deleterious effects, if experienced during operation, could leave little time for corrective actions. Hence, most notably in the context of vehicles, health monitoring/management systems are increasingly being used. Vehicle health monitoring/management systems monitor various health-related characteristics of the vehicle. Such operational health characteristics may, in some instances, be further decomposed to the health characteristics of major operational systems and subsystems of the vehicle.
In addition to monitoring vehicle health status, it would be desirable to determine the potential effect that a potentially degraded system, subsystem, or component may have on the overall capabilities of the vehicle, and supply information of these potential effects so that a system may, if needed, reconfigure itself to accommodate such a degraded system, subsystem, or component. For example, if an aerodynamic surface actuator fails or degrades during flight, flight controls may reallocate control to other surfaces. If a fault degrades the aerodynamics to a point where the vehicle will be unable to successfully complete its mission, mitigating actions (such as abort or re-plan) may be needed to minimize the impact of the fault. Heretofore, such capabilities have not been implemented with adequate precision and/or without undue complexity.
In a vehicle with power, weight, and size constraints, the onboard health monitors are often insufficient to fully isolate faults due to the complexities of the vehicle. What is needed is a health management system and method that accurately determines the lost/remaining functional capabilities of a vehicle and interfaces to the control system, and that does not rely on fully isolating a fault.